I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong. Here’s a passage prior to before I added lyrics:
Now, here it is once I’ve typed in lyrics (in Page view):
The syllable “Har” should start on the grace-note, and I then entered a hyphen to indicate I wanted the next note to be skipped such that the final part of the word (“lem”) should fall on the concert Eb. However, when I do this (as you can see), the lyrics spacing is very glitchy. Am I doing something wrong or is this some sort of bug?
I should add that the same problem happens when I try to under an “underline” (to indicate to hold out a syllable, before going to a new word on the subsequent note), as in this example:
Thanks for any help!
It’s not so much a bug as a limitation in Dorico’s spacing algorithm. Grace notes are considered for note spacing in a different way to other kinds of items, because they are effectively spaced as their own little runs of music and then inserted at a fixed width into the flexible width of a system.
However, it’s unusual to write the syllable on the grace note in this kind of situation: provided you don’t need a different syllable for the grace note itself, it’s more customary to write the lyric on the main note. The singer will do the right thing anyway!
As a professional singer, I totally second Daniel’s advice. We always start the graces notes with the syllable that comes on the “real” note (except when we’re talking about grace notes slurred to the previous note, of course).
I don’t ever begrudge anyone wanting an automatic solution, but I do think we have been spoiled by dorico’s algorithms and we forget sometimes that good old fashioned engraving is necessary.
I should have mentioned that this flamenco work has a lot of these melismas, almost every 2nd bar of a long set of songs (more than an hour of music) has those. Manual alignment is not an option for me, so I’ll finally leave them so.
I’m not asking for a “good old fashioned engraving”, but for a clear one, in fact, the Gould’s option for complex music, like flamenco, full of melismas:
